letters, secure in a sincere belief, were very precious, I remember. Sometimes, though never successfully, they tempted me almost to giving my full confidence and telling more than my camouflaged reports revealed. From the rest of my family, with the exception of a really loved brother, I knew myself entirely divorced, a divorce that later years proved final and somehow inevitable.
To my father, who was always something of a stranger to me, I could never tell my heart; my mother, on the other hand, always had my confidence, coupled with an austere respect. Few words passed between us, yet she always knew, I felt, my thoughts. And this full confidence dated, oddly enough, from an incident in early childhood, when I was saying the Lord's Prayer at her knee. There was a phrase that puzzled me even when I was in knickerbockers: "Lead us not into temptation...." I stopped, looked up into her face, and asked: "But would He lead me into temptation unless I asked Him not to?" Her eyes opened, she gazed down into mine with a thoughtful, if perplexed expression, for a moment she was evidently at a loss how to answer. She hesitated, then decided to trust me with the truth: "I have never quite understood those words myself," she said. "I think, though, it is best to leave their explanation to Him, and to say the words exactly as He taught them."
"Old souls" and "young souls" was a classification that ruled my mind in this New York period: my mother was of the former, my father of the latter. In the Old lay innate the fruits, the results, the memories of many many previous lives, and this ripeness of long experience showed itself in certain ways--in taste, in judgment, in their standard of values, in that mysterious quality called tact; above all, perhaps, in the type and quality of goods they desired from life. Worldly ambitions, so-called, were generally negligible in them. What we label to-day as the subconscious was invariably fully charged; also, without
too much difficulty, accessible. It made them interesting,
